The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The same situation – where two district leaders pursued different policies but each maintained they were following the will of their Führer – occurred in the context of Nazi policy towards the Jews. The Łόdź ghetto, established by Arthur Greiser, was in existence at the same time as the Gauleiter of East Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht, was pursuing a totally different policy. In Bracht’s realm, Albrecht Schmelt of the SS compelled Jews to work as forced labour on a variety of industrial and construction projects,39 with the result that the Jews in the major cities that Bracht controlled, such as Katowice and Będzin, were not imprisoned in ghettos.40

  This interaction between visionary leadership from above and initiatives from below was characteristic of the way the Holocaust developed. And, as we shall see, in the process of this evolution those involved were influenced not just by their own hate-filled ideology but also by the changing world around them.

  That autumn Hitler was also considering large strategic questions – the most important of which was whether he should finally authorize the invasion of the Soviet Union and launch a war of destruction without parallel in history. It was a dilemma that he resolved after meeting Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. Molotov arrived for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop in Berlin on 12 November 1940. He had come armed with a list of detailed questions about the relationship between the two countries – what, for example, were Germany’s exact intentions towards the buffer states between them, such as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria? But Hitler and Ribbentrop didn’t want to dwell on such prosaic topics. Instead they talked in grandiose – and vague – terms of a future German world empire. Partly as a result of this mismatch between the practical Molotov and the visionary Hitler, the Soviet official interpreter at the talks described the encounter as ‘tiresome and obviously pointless’.41 A month after this dialogue of the deaf, on 18 December 1940, Hitler signed the plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union – codenamed Operation Barbarossa, after the nickname of Emperor Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor who had led the Third Crusade in the twelfth century.

  This time German military commanders raised little objection to Hitler’s epic plans. In part that was because of the success of the invasion of France, and Nazi ideological teaching which said the Soviets were ‘subhuman’, but it was also because military intelligence suggested that the Red Army was not much of a threat. Soviet forces had recently performed badly in the war against Finland, and Stalin had purged the Red Army of many of the Soviet Union’s finest officers during the 1930s, frightened they were plotting against him. All this led General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Wehrmacht’s Operations Staff, to remark: ‘The Russian colossus will prove to be a pig’s bladder, prick it and it will burst.’42

  Hitler’s decision to commit to an invasion of the Soviet Union had immediate consequences for Nazi policy towards the Jews. Since the idea of shipping the Jews to ‘a colony in Africa’ had been shelved, a new policy had to be devised for the Jews imprisoned in Poland in ghettos. The Nazis, as we have seen, had previously imagined that these ghettos were only a temporary measure until the Jews could be expelled from the Reich.

  Conditions in the Łόdź ghetto were desperate by the summer of 1940. There were food riots in August, with a crowd of starving Jews shouting, ‘We want bread, we’re dying from hunger!’43 The Nazi officials in the Warthegau asked Hans Frank to allow the Jews to be deported to the General Government since ‘the situation regarding the Jews in the Warthegau worsened day by day’ and the ghetto ‘had actually only been erected on the condition that the deportation of the Jews would begin by mid-year at the latest’.44

  True to his past actions, Hans Frank refused to take the inhabitants of the Łόdź ghetto into his jurisdiction. So it was left to the authorities in the Warthegau to come up with a solution to their self-created problem. Since the Jews in the ghetto no longer had any money to buy food from the Germans, the Nazis faced a stark choice – let the Jews starve to death or permit them to work in order to earn money to pay for food. The different sides of this dilemma were personified by two people: Hans Biebow, the German chief of the ghetto administration, and Alexander Palfinger, a slightly more junior ghetto official. Estera Frenkiel, a Polish Jew who worked in the office of the Jewish Council within the ghetto, dealt with both of these German bureaucrats in the summer and autumn of 1940. Palfinger, she remembers, was happy to see the Jews in the ghetto ‘starve to death’.45 Her recollection is supported by documentary evidence from the time. ‘A rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference,’ wrote Palfinger in a report in late 1940, ‘if not to say desirable, as long as the concomitant effects leave the public interest of the German people untouched.’46 Biebow, on the other hand, took a very different view. As Estera Frenkiel says, ‘Biebow had great entrepreneurial spirit. He had great powers of persuasion – something Palfinger lacked. He carried on trying to persuade people until spittle formed at the sides of his mouth.’47 Biebow proposed that the ghetto become self-sustaining. Factories and workshops could be established for the Jews and the goods they made sold in order to provide money for food.

  Biebow’s argument won the day. The Nazis gave the Jewish Council within the ghetto a 3 million Reichsmark ‘loan’ (from money previously stolen from the Jews) in order to set up the necessary infrastructure. This was just what Rumkowski, the Jewish head of the ghetto, had wanted. He had lobbied the Mayor of Łόdź for a network of workshops to be established in the ghetto, saying, ‘There are in the ghetto about 8–10,000 experts of various branches … Shoe and bootmakers (manual and mechan[ized]), saddlers … tailors (made to measure and mass production) … hat and cap makers, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, cabinetmakers, masons, painters, bookbinders, upholsterers. I could arrange for these [skilled artisans] to work for the authorities …’48

  Biebow’s victory was a key moment in this history. For it marked the transition from the ghetto as a temporary measure – a holding area where the Jews were confined, awaiting deportation somewhere else – to an institution that could theoretically become self-sufficient. Rumkowski, in particular, welcomed this development, because he believed the key to the survival of the ghetto was for the Jews to make themselves useful to the Germans. He called this ‘Rescue through work’. As a consequence, those who worked in the ghetto received more food than those who were unemployed.49 Both the Nazis and the imprisoned Jews had an interest in making the new system work. The Jews because they had witnessed how close the Nazis had come to letting them starve to death over the summer, and the Nazis because there was money to be made.

  The new system was corrupt on both sides. Arthur Greiser, the ruler of the Warthegau, sought to get personally rich from the ghetto. Biebow regularly transferred money into an account set up in Greiser’s name.50 Estera Frenkiel even witnessed a suitcase full of valuables from the ghetto sent via Biebow to Greiser. On the Jewish side, Rumkowski now possessed even more personal power than he had before, since everything the Germans supplied to the ghetto under this new arrangement was routed through his office. He decided to enrich himself at the expense of others, and in the process created a better standard of living for himself than anyone else in the ghetto. He even, for instance, had a personal carriage and driver.

  Meanwhile, just over 70 miles to the east, in Warsaw in the General Government, the largest ghetto of all was about to be sealed off from the outside world. More than 400,000 Jews would be imprisoned in the 1.5 square miles of the Warsaw ghetto – as many Jews in this small area as there were in the whole of France, Denmark and Norway. Around 30 per cent of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, and the enormous scale of this undertaking partly explains why this, the largest of the ghettos, was created relatively late.

  The Jews of Warsaw were targeted for persecution from the moment the Germans entered the city just over four weeks after the start of the war. Within days the Nazis had ordered the Jews to create a Jewish Council through which anti-Semitic measures could be communicated to the J
ewish population. Over the next few months the Jews of Warsaw were ordered to identify themselves by wearing a blue Star of David on a white armband, Jewish schools were closed and Jewish wealth seized. Jews were captured and made to work as forced labourers, and were frequently tormented by the Germans. ‘Here’s a game they play at the garages in the Dinance park,’ wrote Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Warsaw Jew, in February 1940. ‘The workers are ordered to beat one another with their galoshes … A rabbi was ordered to shit in his pants. They divide the workers into groups, and have the groups fight each other … I have seen people badly injured in these games.’51 He also recorded that ‘Both yesterday and today women were seized for labour. And, it just so happened, women in fur coats. They’re ordered to wash the pavement with their panties, then put them on again wet.’52

  Jews were at risk not just from Germans, but from Poles. Adam Czerniaków, an engineer by training and now the leader of the Warsaw Jewish Council, wrote in his diary in December 1939 that a mad Polish woman ‘molests the Jews, striking them and grabbing their hats’.53 The following month he described how a ‘gang of [Polish] teenage hooligans, which for the last several days was beating up the Jews, paraded in front of the [Jewish] Community offices breaking the windows in the houses on the other side of the street’.54 Other Poles thought that they could now steal from the Jews with impunity. On New Year’s Eve 1939, ‘two strangers’ visited Czerniaków and told him that his apartment was to be ‘requisitioned’. It subsequently transpired that the ‘requisitioner’ of his apartment was ‘a driver delivering or distributing soups’ – leaving Czerniaków with the problem of whether or not he should ask the SS to punish the Pole who had tried to steal his home.55

  After the ghetto had been sealed in November 1940, the Nazis pursued the same policy as they had initially in Łόdź – they forced the Jews to pay for their own food or starve. Alexander Palfinger, who had lost the argument in Łόdź about whether or not to let the Jews die in large numbers, was appointed to run the Transferstelle in Warsaw, the department that assessed how much the goods surrendered by the Jews in the ghetto were worth and how much food they could expect in return. Palfinger’s presence was disturbing news for the Warsaw Jews. He had not changed his view – it remained a matter of ‘total indifference’ to him how many Jews died.

  Just as in the Łόdź ghetto, those Jews who had valuables to sell or could find some paid work within the ghetto had a chance to stave off starvation. Wealthy Jews bought supplies that had been smuggled into the ghetto – one estimate is that more than 80 per cent of the food in the ghetto was purchased on the black market.56 If you were unemployed or owned nothing then you were at risk of a swift death. In desperation women even sold themselves. Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in January 1941 that ‘streetwalking has become notable’ and that ‘yesterday, a very respectable looking woman detained me.’ The insight he gained into human nature as a result of this experience was bleak. ‘Necessity drives people to anything.’57

  Halina Birenbaum was eleven years old when her family was imprisoned in the ghetto. In the context of the horror of the ghetto, she was fortunate. One of her brothers, Mirek, was a medical student and worked in a Jewish hospital. He ‘used to do injections’ privately for wealthy Jews within the ghetto, so she did not starve. Watching from her position of relative privilege, she was shocked by the sights she saw. Children lay ‘on pavements, in the streets, courtyards of houses … so swollen [with hunger] that you could hardly see the eyes in their faces’. She remembers a ‘very tall ginger girl’ who performed on the street in order to try and gain a few coins to buy food. She recited ‘in Yiddish a song she wrote about how they [the Germans] drove her out from her town, how her parents died one after another and her brothers too. And she was saying to God, “How long will it take? Is the glass not yet full of our tears?” I will never forget this girl.’58

  Just as in Łόdź, a crisis point was reached in Warsaw within a few months. The head of the Economic Division of the General Government wrote a report for Hans Frank in which he outlined the fundamental question that had to be answered: was the Warsaw ghetto part of a plan to ‘liquidate the Jews’59 or an attempt to hold the Jews alive for an unspecified period of time? If the latter, then work had to be found for around 60,000 Jews to ensure that enough food could be purchased to feed the rest. Just as he had in Łódź, Palfinger did his best to discredit those who argued that the Jews should be permitted to work in large numbers, and just as he had in Łódź, he lost the argument. Hans Frank sacked Palfinger in April 1941 and replaced him with Max Bischoff, who was charged with making the ghetto productive. At a meeting in May 1941, Adam Czerniaków, now the Jewish leader of the ghetto – the equivalent position to the one Rumkowski held in Łódź – was informed that ‘starving the Jews’ was not the objective of the Nazis, and that ‘there is the possibility that the food rations would be increased and that there will be work or orders for the workers.’60 During the same meeting Czerniaków was also told that ‘the corpses lying in the streets create a very bad impression’ and that the ‘corpses … must be cleared away quickly’.

  Although the systematic murder of every Jew by starvation did not now take place, there was still not enough food, despite Nazi promises, to feed everyone in the ghetto. In June 1941, a month after the meeting at which the Nazis had indicated they would increase the food ration, Czerniaków recorded that his work had been interrupted by beggars moaning under his window, ‘Bread, bread! I am hungry, hungry!’61

  At the same time as Jews died from lack of food in the Warsaw ghetto, plans were under discussion elsewhere in the Nazi state to starve millions of people to death in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union. On 2 May 1941 the central economic agency of the Wehrmacht stated that since the ‘whole’ of the invading German Army would have to be ‘fed at the expense of Russia’ this meant that ‘tens of millions of [Soviet] men will undoubtedly starve to death if we take away all we need from the country.’62 Later that month, on 23 May, the same agency produced another document entitled ‘Political-Economic Guidelines for the Economic Organization East’ which estimated that 30 million people might die of hunger in the Soviet Union as a consequence of the German Army seizing their food.63

  Such thinking was not just the product of expediency. German Army planners didn’t decide in a vacuum to starve 30 million people to death. Ideological beliefs underpinned their thinking, for they worked in an environment in which German economists calculated how many people in the eastern territories were ‘surplus to requirements’.64 What would be the advantage, the Nazis maintained, in winning new land and yet simultaneously acquiring millions of ‘useless eaters’? Himmler certainly understood the genocidal consequences of this logic. Just days before the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched, he told his senior SS colleagues that ‘the purpose of the Russian campaign’ was ‘to decimate the Slavic population by 30 millions’.65

  The Nazis’ plan was brutally audacious. During the war against the Soviet Union, they were planning to starve to death more than the combined population of Sweden, Norway and Belgium.66 This objective was in their minds before they had conceived the idea of creating factories of death in order to exterminate the Jewish people. Understandably, we ask today – what kind of human beings could consider such an idea? And the answer is – profoundly racist ones. We have already seen how not just Hitler but the whole Nazi state functioned on the iron premise of relative racial value. The German soldiers who were about to invade the Soviet Union were considered more valuable human beings than the ones they would find there. The Slavs were a ‘race’ that Hitler considered ‘a mass of born slaves’.67 Moreover, since some of the Slavs in the Soviet Union were also both ‘Bolsheviks’ and Jews, that meant that there were three separate reasons for the committed Nazi to loathe one single Soviet citizen, three reasons to despise one human being who was, at the same time, Slavic, Bolshevik and Jewish.

  There was also, according to Hitler, another unchalleng
eable intellectual justification for taking food from millions of people and starving them to death. ‘The earth continues to go round,’ he said, ‘whether it’s the man who kills the tiger or the tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it’s the law of nature. The world doesn’t change; its laws are eternal.’68 For Hitler, a sense of common humanity was a sign of weakness. If you wanted something, you should try and take it. If you were strong enough to get what you wanted from someone else, then you deserved it. There was nothing else to say. The great religious leaders, the great humanist thinkers – all of them had been wasting their time.

  On 30 March 1941, Hitler explained to his generals that the forthcoming war with the Soviet Union would be a ‘clash of two ideologies’, and reiterated, ‘Communism is an enormous danger for our future.’ It followed, he said, that ‘We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of extermination. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe.’ Hitler called for the normal rules of war to be set aside during the fight against the Soviet Union, and demanded the ‘Extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia’.69 In his eyes, the war in the east would be an epic struggle for German domination – the epoch-changing conflict that he had dreamt of for years.